Posted
by
CowboyNealon Friday April 15, 2005 @05:06AM
from the untested-waters dept.

bonch writes "Tom's Hardware Guide is running an article about Windows XP Service Pack 2 and its limited acceptance by IT administrators. AssetMetrix is cited in the article as reporting that fewer than 24% of over 136,000 Windows XP PCs in 251 North American corporations even had SP2 installed. THG goes on to describe the reasons given by admins and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of installing SP2."

After I installed SP2, I found that a lot of things started crashing (just applications, not system crashes). I eventually realised the problem was that my CPU has an NX bit, and SP2 had enabled it. Once I disabled it, all the problems went away.

I'd like to have the NX bit enabled to improve security, but it's not worth it if it causes so much software to crash. The thing that worries me is that most people wouldn't have a clue about any of this, so would just be stuck with a choice between crashing applications or removing SP2.

Oddly enough, I had the opposite happen. Okay, keeping in mind that probably 95% of what I use my computer for revolves around browsing, e-mail and games, I wasn't having that many problems before, but I was getting the occassional (like once every two or three days) complete freeze-up of World of Warcraft. After SP2 was installed, it has happened once. And that more likely had to do with me running WinAMP and a web browser at the same time, alt-tabbing between them to look up item drop rates and changing playlists.

Yes, it's not 100% perfect. No upgrade ever is. Especially considering the staggering amount of code in XP. But for some of us, it's working just fine.

Does your CPU support NX? When I wrote the grandparent post, I didn't bother to think that only the most recent x86 CPUs support NX, so people with older CPUs (most people) won't run into these problems anyway.

The parent post is moderated as "Funny", but that's what happened to us.
We installed SP2 on numerous machines. There were a variety of problems.
Re-installing SP2 and rebooting several times often cured the problems.
Sometimes it was necessary to reload the entire Windows SP2 operating
system.

We troubleshot one of the problems and discovered that SP2 expects that a
particular file exists on the target computer, before it has copied that file.
So, if the version that was already on the target computer is not recent
enough, SP2 will crash. We reported this to Microsoft, but there was only a
spacey response, as though confusion reigned. Microsoft did not seem to have
the capacity to respond sensibly.

SP2 has numerous fixes for problems with USB 2.0. USB operated much
better for us after SP2 was installed.

Microsoft gives us the impression that the company has a sloppy
management style supervising coders who are not given enough time to do a good
job. If you don't install SP2, you are not giving Microsoft the opportunity to
fix some of its bugs. Someone once said that the Microsoft motto was "The
whole world is our beta test site." According to that, Windows XP SP2 is just
the first release version of Windows XP. We had many, many time-consuming
problems with the pre-SP1 version; in our opinion, it was not ready for
release; it could be made to work, but it was a time-waster. Maybe it's
foolish to believe that two billionaires could care what happens to the less
rich.

All of our Microsoft OS computers are now using SP2 with all the most
recent critical updates, with no unexplained problems for months.

Be careful with Windows XP updates other than critical updates.
Someone made a mistake and updated a computer here recently with a recommended
hardware driver. The name of the driver on the Windows Update web site is
different from the name of the driver once installed. That computer has never
had an "HP wireless keyboard" attached to it.

Microsoft gives us the impression that the company has a sloppy management style supervising coders who are not given enough time to do a good job. If you don't install SP2, you are not giving Microsoft the opportunity to fix some of its bugs. Someone once said that the Microsoft motto was "The whole world is our beta test site." According to that, Windows XP SP2 is just the first release version of Windows XP. We had many, many time-consuming problems with the pre-SP1 version; in our opinion, it was not re

Heck, forget certified, a lot of applications plain don't WORK under SP2.

Some new client software that one acquaintence is being pressured to look at by her current vendor doesn't work at all under SP2. The soon-to-be-discontinued client works just fine since it's accessed via a terminal emulator and can therefore be accessed from any platform with a terminal emulator.
The new one can't. Nor does it function under XP SP2.

If the vendor came out with a linux or bsd port for the new client then she could forget about MS-Windows altogether and wouldn't have to have those machines set up for dual boot. But then that would make sense.

1) People have enough problems with Windows without worrying about an upgrade that they've heard countless times will BREAK existing applications.
2) Some percentage of the population is simply pirating Windows and is afraid they'll get "caught" if they try to upgrade.
3) SP2 is seen as the first step in Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" initiative.
4) It breaks Halo. C'mon.

The TCP/IP stack now limits the number of simultaneous incomplete outbound TCP connection attempts. After the limit has been reached, subsequent connection attempts are put in a queue and will be resolved at a fixed rate. Under normal operation, when applications are connecting to available hosts at valid IP addresses, no connection rate-limiting will occur. When it does occur, a new event, with ID 4226, appears in the system's event log.

Only ones I have seen on the list Microsoft publishes have been programs that need access through Windows Firewall. Sometimes it's easy to fix it....most times it isn't. Windows Firewall woul dbe MUCH better if:

It let you open the ports you need, with plenty of warning message of what may/may not happen.

Do more active scanning of the packets coming in and going out for malicious packets.

Windows Firewall is not enough in someways, but too much and not fine grained enough in control in other ways.

Yup, that is why the company I work for, one of the LARGEST communications companies in the USA, does not even run XP yet.

W2K does everything that we need..... it's more STABLE than XP, and we do not have application incompatability. Hell we can even run some of the old windows 95 apps and DOS apps without problems.

Wanna hear something funnier, for our critical stuff, the servers that make us $10,000 an hour running commercials, still run windows NT 4.0 because W2K is not proven to us to be as stable as NT4 in that specific use on that hardware. Also, cince those servers are on their own protected network any comments of "hax0r3d or own3d" are silly cince the script kiddie will need physical access or capable of tapping a fiber optic line, you can not access it without sitting in one of the data centers or the server locations.

Although the temptation is pretty high on that gear, imagine forcing all the top channels in a community to start playing monty python and the holy grail at midnight.

Huh? NT4 and NT4 server has cost us nothing to "support" over the past couple of years that it has been "supported" and let's also talk about the older NT 3.51 servers (we have 2 500 tape jukebox archive servers running that) that also has not given us any "support costs" cince it was EOL.

we hire competent people here for IT that know how to maintain a wide range of operating systems. in fact we have never in the past 6 years I have been here called on microsoft for any support, every patch they released usually went through 3 months of intense testing before we ever released one to production servers.....

so in that aspect microsofts "support" costs more than no support.

anyways, a completely insecure computer is very safe if you create your networks and use proceedures that protect the equipment and networks.

Please feel free to tell me how we are going to have HUGE support costs after it EOL's... as we have not seen it for any other OS that is EOL here.

I usually only hear about that support myth from the MS salesmen that show up from time to time.

anyways, a completely insecure computer is very safe if you create your networks and use proceedures that protect the equipment and networks.

I'm sure your company has strict procedures in place to protect against this sort of thing. However, I do feel the need to point out that, statstically, most security-related incidents are caused by insiders.

A couple of years back when I was still working as an admin I was hired by a company and on my first week there was a security incident. Upon investigation it turned out it was an ex-admin who had installed trojans on many of the servers that he had root access to while he was working there.

This just demonstrates the problem Microsoft faces, they want to lockdown the OS and make it more secure, but the pain level associated with it is too high for some Windows users who don't want to fool around with port numbers etc.

It's always easier to design something well from the start than to try and polish a turd.

Alternately, Microsoft's biggest security problem isn't their own development, but the braindead admins who refuse to install patches to address critical security issues (anyone remember Slammer?). I read a lot of the comments on/. and I see a community which very strongly tends towards blaiming a vendor for their past mistakes while refusing to let them fix the problem.

I spent just over 3 months testing SP2 with all of our internal and external applications as well as stress tests for performance differences between SP1a and SP2. SP2 got the green flag the second time round (it failed because some internal applications failed, these were updated as was decided by IM).

I finished doing the last update about 3 weeks ago and have not had any problems relating to SP2 yet which is great.

IMO the only negative thing about SP2 is its size/time to install. It has slowed down deployment because of the bandwidth it uses and the the time it takes to install which is a major impact to production, which means it needs to be down out of office hours which means IT support need to work over time, etc.

While deployment of SP2 was tiring and long I would rather got on with it than wait it out like some companies are doing.

This is a 200Mb file that you need to send to every computer on the corp. network, so even if you were ready to start deploying SP2 you couldn't do so over night.

Further more SP2 adds LOTS of functionality and changes the behaviour of Windows and thus is extremely likely to break things on a corp. setup.

So I am not at all shocked that network admins haven't all installed it yet.. But I bet you if you changed the survey to - "How many network admins are installing (Via Slipstream) SP2 on new installations?" you would get a very positive and different result.

You are correct. But it is not unusual to find three or more "Base Systems" on a network. You would have to design a patch procedure for all of your base systems and test it; which would be very time consuming (thus the problem).

* It was late- it's MS. are you surprised? is this a valid reason not to upgrade?* Lots of apps don't work with XP SP2, including some of Microsoft's own- not out-of-the-box no. but after disabling/modifying the build-in firewall they will* It's been known to be unstable- a MS product that's unstable? no way!! I can only say that my pc doesn't crash more now that i've installed SP2.* Difficult to install- maybe if you have parkinson disease

This is fairly normal for a major overhaul of an OS. Delivery dates change. SP2 fundamentally changed many of the ways that XP operates, and, contrary to some opinions, really did raise the bar on Windows security. Besides, the article to which you link was complaining about the delay of a few days from the release to premium subscribers. That's getting a little pedantic.

Lots of apps don't work with XP SP2 [microsoft.com], including some of Microsoft's own

Many of the apps on the list work fine on 32-bit XP SP2, but have problems on 64-bit. Most of the others have patches available to allow them to work fine with SP2. VirtualPC, for example, works at expected speeds when updated.

It's been known to be [crn.com] unstable [crn.com]

I'd like to be able to comment on this, but the article is expired.

Difficult to install [thechannelinsider.com]

Might be interesting to comment on this one, but it, too, is unavailable.

Additions like the firewall have serious shortcomings [eweek.com]

Wow, this is getting to be a trend. However, the Windows firewall was never intended to be an end-all, be-all solution. It was intended to make attacks more difficult by blocking off certain common ports. A middle ground was struck between home and enterprise users (one that was too open, IMHO) that still left some things somewhat open, but it's better than nothing. Had they come out with a miniature version of ISA, we'd have heard shouts (possibly including some from you, I suspect) that Microsoft was trying to put the security companies out of business.

It messes with settings and permissions [theregister.co.uk]

Of course it changes settings, though I saw little about changes to permissions. But that article, while somewhat correct on a few things, misses wide on others. It calls for Automatic Updates to be disabled because "users should update Windows manually, though regularly, paying attention to the various update options and their relevance to one's system," which we know siginificant portions of the installed userbase do not do, and have no knowledge to do so. It is a mechanism that, while potentially abusable by Microsoft, is by far the lesser evil when compared to worms running rampant because some patch from eight months prior wasn't installed.

Is still vulnerable anyway [eweek.com] in many ways [zdnet.co.uk], and it can take weeks or months to force a repair or even admission.

Microsoft never claimed that SP2 would be vulnerability-free. It claimed that it would be more secure, and generally speaking has been correct in this. Even the patches that have covered both SP1 and SP2 have in many cases had lower severity ratings for SP2.

Doesn't fix or remove MSIE [eweek.com]

Well, they're not going to remove IE, so there's not much point in complaining about that. But whether it fixes it is another question. Are there still vulnerabilities? Sure there are. But while IE still has a good distance to go, IE6 SP2 is far superior to its predecessors in terms of default security and blocking random installations. I have personal clients who were at first annoyed by IE's new features, and in recent months have come to love that it blocks so much (I'm still working on converting some of them to Firefox).

Has DRM features that let spammers 0wn [zdnet.co.uk] the machine

Not sure if this particular issue was ever directly addressed by Microsoft, but since I haven't seen much evidence of this method being used to gather up armies of zombies (most do it by e-mail or open ports), I'm not sure how serious it was to begin with.

While there might be good reasons for not installing here and there, I suspect most of the so called "admins" are just to lazy or simply clueless when it comes to large scale software distribution.

And yet they've successfully set up those networks in the first place, probably installed numerous other WinXP patches across their networks afterwards, probably installed and configured office apps, corporate database stuff, corporate Intranet stuff, and more.

Really, if installing SP2 from a centralised control point isn't a matter of "Click here" and perhaps fixing some unusual incompatibility problems on a small proportion of machines, then I'm betting it's SP2 (or its installation tools) that is broken, not the IT staff.

I've read the article and all, but I also try to apply basic critical thinking skills. Do you really expect the admins they survey to admit the reason is they are lazy? This would be like surveying microsoft employees asking "Is Microsoft anti-competitive?". Of course they'll say no, but I don't think that should be be accepted as fact.

The survey the article discusses says nothing about why, but apparently THG contacted "some admins in the trenches" who apparently gave some reasons. Of course they don't bother giving numbers of "admins in the trenches" they contacted or any relavent info.

I admin about 500 PCs, and we had NO problems. Granted almost all of the PCs have "standardized" hardware. No, not all PCs and periphials are identical but ALMOST all are from a single vendor (DELL) and have VERY similar hardware. We also have about a dozen standard software builds (with of course a number of one-off builds). We use a decent mix of MS apps, 3-rd party apps, and in-house apps.

The biggest issue we had was help-desk calls about pop-ups or ActiveX controls being blocked by default in IE. Preping for the rollout wasn't a very big task. Took under a week to fully test on standard builds.

I like/. and all, but the whole issue of SP2 seems to have a TON of FUD surrounding it on/. Now I'm not suggesting there are no issues with SP2 and I'm sure some people have had issues, but I really wonder about some of the/. posters. I have friends who had "issues" with SP2, but nothing like I've read here. The worst case I personally know of is a company who had 3 apps "broken" by SP2 but were all relativly easily "fixed" with small tweaks to SP2's defaults. These were caught during testing and roll-out went smoothly.

Maybe I (and the admins I know) were just "lucky", but based on my experience I have a really hard time accepting the crap I've read about SP2 on/. (which isn't all that unusual I guess).;-)

It breaks a whole bunch of apps [microsoft.com]. It is a large enough list that something will probably not work on a high percentage of machines in any sizable deployment of Windows XP.

Windows admins have a good reason to be a bit careful here. Windows Service Packs have a long tradition of making systems or applications no longer function. After getting burned a few times, you learn to be careful.

Every move up the progressive OS cycle leaves programs behind that don't work. I sometimes spend hours on google trying to find workarounds to get old games working. You won't believe what you have to do to get System Shock 2 working on XP.

That may be, but we've heard people raving for years about MS security, most of which comes down to legacy support and the inherently bad design decisions in the code that supports that. So, they're starting to fix things, slowly. We've all predicted applications aren't going to work any longer when they make the change. But that's really just too bad. We can't really have it both ways; it wasn't done right the first time, so we either get security, or we get legacy application support. Not both.

"enough list that something will probably not work on a high percentage of machines in any sizable deployment of Windows XP."

From experience, larger deployments of machines tend to have a much smaller pool of applications that are used. This is partly down to administration overheads, machine build overheads and user permissions - most in a large deployment won't have the ability to add new software themselves. If you use a piece of software widely, then it's easier to replace/patch/whatever. A worse scen

Some administrators take every opportunity to whinge and moan when Microsoft products have a security vulnerability. When Microsoft do the "right thing" (such as XP SP2), there is more whinging and moaning . Security is not easy - the spin on security being a "business enabler" should have died with the dot com bust. Security restricts and breaks functionality, sometimes deliberately, with the tradeoff that you are now accepting less overall risk in your environment.

Some administrators take every opportunity to whinge and moan when Microsoft products have a security vulnerability. When Microsoft do the "right thing" (such as XP SP2), there is more whinging and moaning.

Microsoft has yet to do the right thing. The security community has been beggng them to back out of the tight browser/desktop integration and "security zones" since 1997, and split the rendering and access functionality of the HTML control into separate components so you CAN run a locked-down sandboxed version of Internet Explorer if you want to... but instead Microsoft refuses to admit they made a mistake and patches symptom after symptom instead of attacking the disease.

That's why I, wearing my "security hat", banned all internet-capable applications that used the MS HTML control for rendering... back in 1997. As long as that ban was in effect we had zero virus and security panics, and we were the only division of our company for which that was the case.

The fundamental design of the HTML control is broken and unfixable. THe only solution is to back out of that design at a very low level, and rewrite all the applications that use it to handle access themselves. In 1997 I expected that Microsoft would do that... by now, it's obvious that they won't. They're afraid of losing face.

The right thing, from a security point of view, is to stop using Internet Explorer, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, Realplayer, and all other applications that use the MS HTML control to display potentially untrusted data whether they're shipped by Microsoft or some third party. Microsoft has proven over and over again for the last seven years that there is no other rational course of action.

SP2 and every other "security" patch that Microsoft provides are just smoke and mirrors.

I wish I had the power to ban applications like that. It is unfortunate that I cannot, but that said, my deployment of "firefox" has been wildly successful. With SP2 installed, the OS seems to respect my default browser settings quite nicely in that when HTML formatted emails contain a link, the browser that is opened is still Firefox even though it's apparant that MSIE is being used to render the email. That's certainly unexpected behavior from Microsoft and I'm pleased with it.

The results? Fantastic. My spyware-ridden network dropped to near-zero in terms of infestation. There is only one machine that still needs MSIE and for that, I taught that user that MSIE isn't really "gone" that she only needs to open an explorer and type in the URL or select a favorite that has been saved. Apparently ADP isn't as security conscious as they are of "ease of use and implementation." (Methinks their in-house developers only know one thing is all. One of these days I'm going to write a scathing message about the company so many depend on for payroll and other critical business functions using something known in the security community to be a huge blazing hole.)

I pray for the day when some really smart person writes replacement code that will allow a complete switchover from MSIE to Firefox -- that would include all of those APIs and things that third-party software uses to activate the MSIE rendering...it would be a good day for all.

Security might have to restrict potentially dangerous functionality, but if your security is breaking functionality that wasn't a vulnerability in the first place, it's not really security, it's just a bug.

Firstly, it didn't used to be considered "badly written" - even Halo by Microsoft is in that list.

Secondly, and more importantly, no application, no matter how it is written, should be able to kill the kernel! That is just ridiculous, and in other circumstances would be referred to as a local denial of service vulnerability.

If I'm not mistaken Halo had difficulties on SP2 with certain video cards with 256MB of RAM and then only on certain driver version but it never killed the kernel. Halo PC was done by Gearbox and published by MS, btw.

The networks administrators are either (or many) of the following: just very lazy, unable to fix internal applications that would break, unable to upgrade to versions of boxed or otherwise external apps that would break, unwilling to spend time with this being busy with other stuff or just waiting for the perfect moment to upgrade (which in the vast majority of cases will *never* surface).

The rest of us who aren't network admins either have it installed already, can't install it because our network admin w

The rest of us who aren't network admins either have it installed already, can't install it because our network admin won't let us, won't install it because it'll break something and we can't spend five minutes looking for a patch because that's too much work, or we've never heard of it.

You forgot probably the most likely explanation among the WinXP users who read this forum: we've done the research, seen what vulnerabilities are supposed to be addressed, and concluded that we'd rather rely on our exist

I'm not surprised at the reluctance.
Given that many of the SP2 changes relate to networks and firewalls, the bigger the corporate network the bigger the chance the upgrade will take some time to get working for everyone in a company.
If you are used to fixing problems remotely and the upgrade prevents the problem PC connecting to the network... you see the issue:-)

As long as your internet connection is secure, ie, you have a good firewall or router (as you would have in a large corporate environment), then the negative effects of SP2 outweigh the positive ones.
SP2 breaks network connectivity by limiting the number of connections you can make in a given amount of time.
SP2 creates a bunch of annoying and useless popups and warning messages, with no real extra security (compare vulnerabilities found before and after SP2 on sites like Secunia).
The only thing SP2 does

I had to install SP2 here at work, because of the machine analysis program that examines all the machines connected to this network.I was just tired to see each and every monday the same email that was telling me it was *mandatory* to install the latest Service Pack on my machine.Since I'm not using that many programs here, SP2 works fine anyway.

I recently obtained a copy of Visual Studio 2005 which I wanted to play around with. Install went fine (on XP) UNTIL I tried to install the DOCUMENTATION...which insisted that XP SP2 had to be installed!!

So I installed it. It broke SQL Server 2000 because I hadnt patched it (but wrote information to the event log about how to fix it) but apart from that things went well...

Until I tried to run the spidering app Ive been working on at which point I discovered that XP Pro + SP2 = Castrated System! SP2 limits the number of connections pending opening to 10 (down from 50) and provides no way to change this limit!!!! Unimpressed....

Anyways, given that many pieces of software will only run on systems patched to a certain SP level Id expect that it wont take long before its a required upgrade...having to install it for documentation to work though....that rubbed me the wrong way I must say..

If you don't value your waranty (he he... what warenty?), there is a third-party commmand line tool to change this limit. You can't remove the limit, but you can make it something like 10,000. I've switched to Linux now and I can't remember what it's called, but you can Google for it like a good geek.

I recently obtained a copy of Visual Studio 2005 which I wanted to play around with. Install went fine (on XP) UNTIL I tried to install the DOCUMENTATION...which insisted that XP SP2 had to be installed!!

Would you mind posting a little more detail about this, please? We're shortly going to be in a similar position: needing to use VS2005 to match clients, but corporate standards forbid installing SP2.

In particular, which version of VS2005 are you using (beta 1, one of the CTPs?), and which documentatio

I friend told me this, that she observed that her p2p speeds went down after p2p. At first I didn't quite believe it, after all what could Microsoft do to make XP prejudice against P2P. Then I read this [geekswithblogs.net].

XP Sp2 limiting the number of connection/sec This feature/function can be handy from security point of view. Bink.Nu links to a functionality in Windows XP SP2 that limits conncurrent TCP/IP connections. I vaguely remember reading some relating when I was using Windows 2000 as well about a setting in registry where we can limit the number of TCP/IP Connections. On Googling I found the following link and on this forum . You can save your computer from P2P programs trying to make many connections at the same time and this can also apply to some of the viruses and worms.

To be honest this was the first I heard about it. I just naturally assumed that shareza didn't peform as well as other dedicated P2P software applications. That registery entry seems to be missing and according to what i've read is hard coded in tcpip.sys. I found software to change the number of connections permited in tcpip.sys here [lvllord.de] and it might be covered in XP-antispy [xp-antispy.org] though I've not tested it yet.

In all fairness I have had few problems with XP SP2. Unfortunatly any problem I've had has been hardware related.

I've once written a piece of code that probes all addresses on the local class C subnet, looking for the MySQL server. Yeah, this is a lame-ish solution, but it's much better than trying to explain what an "IP address" or even "server name" is to your average accounting drone.

On 98: the limit of available TCP sockets is pretty low, but Windows will tell your program that the call failed. Ok.On XP SP1: the limit of available sockets is a lot higher. Everything works fine.On XP SP2: Windows will start _10

It does not. It limits the number of pending connections. The biggest problem with this in relation to p2p is that clients often report IP/ports that are unreachable due to firewall/NAT. Hit 10 of those and you can't open any more connections for a while. Also very annoying if you hit a web page where the image server is down. 10 images you can't load? Tarpitted. Personally, I've changed this long ago.

If you have a Windows XP laptop with WI-FI and if you go to conferences where there are wireless networks, then you HAVE to get SP2: it's a crime not to.

The bug mentioned in the article, where Windows sets up an ad hoc network on a preferred SSID it can't find, is lethal in a conference network. One fuckwitted XP box stealing the SSID for its ad hoc network can disconnect hundreds of delegates. Any time that you're nearer the XP box than the access point (s.t. the XP box has more signal), your net access is toast, whether or not you're running windows.

I've been at conferences where there were hourly PA-broadcasts begging XP users to turn off their ad-hoc networks. If you have XP SP1 on-line at a conference, then you should expect to have your laptop pounded into fragments by angry geeks. They will be justified.

Having said that, the problem remains : an admin REALLY BADLY WANTS to upgrade the companies machines, but is always faced with the daunting prospect that even with the best planning, you have NO IDEA what the hell the system is going to do once you start that update.

This is not a probelms with home users who can afford to have their boxes trashed by the upgrade and then freshly installed (or then again, maybe not with

Windows XP SP2 is, um, the current version of Windows. Avoiding it means your systems are running on a legacy OS.
When new programs come out that require SP2 (like the upcoming IE7), it will be too late to start thinking about an upgrade... If it breaks your 5-year-old applications, replace them.
If your internally-generated code isn't ready, fix it.
If you can't cope with the lame Window Firewall, RTFM to customize or disable it.

How long before the legal or finance departments need to use a business-critical Web site that requires IE7 for access?

How long before the legal or finance departments need to use a business-critical Web site that requires IE7 for access?

I'd have thought that, as the customer, if that ever occurred, any sensible business would be telling the provider very loudly about how they will move to another provider if they don't make it Just Work(TM) with all recent browser flavours.

Of course.What is cheaper? Replacing the custom 5-year-old application that Just Works(tm) and costed $200.000 to write, and is generating $200.000 revenue with something that May Not Work(tm), or moving over to a service that is maybe $500/month more expensive but doesn't require IE7?

And in the end, place 1-2 machines with SP2, IE7 and and that service access while keeping the rest of the net unchanged.

Typing this from NT4 machine. I could move over to Win2k with custom apps that are installed here, but

How long before the legal or finance departments need to use a business-critical Web site that requires IE7 for access?

I don't know, you tell me: how long before some criminally stupid web developer creates a business-critical website that requires a specific version of a browser to even work? Not just "doesn't work on Firefox" (which is already in the "criminally stupid" department) but "doesn't work on recent versions of Internet Explorer"? Yes, I know, that's already happened... but in my case it was a website that didn't work on anything later than IE 5.5. Or older, either. Basically, Doctor Evil, this is a sword that cuts both ways.

Or, you could carefully weigh the costs of running an outdated version of Windows against the costs of replacing all of your custom code and apps -- and then make an informed decision. Is it worth spending money and hours redoing your work to run the latest XP? If so, do it; if not, don't. It's a business decision with pros and cons --

I work for a large oil company, and our worldwide (probably hundreds of thousands of PCs) rollout of SP2 killed Exceed, Samba, and a couple of inhouse apps. Turns out the NT guys hadn't even considered it. As a UNIX admin, I had to work quite a few long nights to repair the damage.

...Not everybody. I still have two users that have legacy (ie. OLD AND CRAPPY) applications that were a hack to work on XP SP 0-1. I'm just not feeling like pressing my luck right now.

Of course, the people who do run SP 2 have reported exactly ZERO problems. True, I did have to reinstall Office on one lady's machine, but she also had the worst spyware/adware collection I've ever seen, so that probably had something to do with it.

Bottom line? In my experience, SP 2 is not better or worse than any other

We participated in the private betas for months and months. Found several bugs and app compat issues - got them either resolved or worked around. Shipped it to our users, and are currently at 90% of our 60,000 machines. I can't claim that there have been no problems. There have been some web sites that need work (due to some of the new restrictions in IE) and some apps that are used by only a few users that have some problems - but in the main, this has gone extremely well. I honestly can't figure out why people are waiting on this.

It seems incredibly disingenous of people to on the one hand say, "Windows is full of holes, help us here Microsoft, we are bleeding." and on the other hand say, "well, that's nice but I'd rather keep bleeding than spend the time and effort to apply the fix."

Get with the program IT Admins! Work with the vendors of the apps if you have to, get the firewall exceptions in and SHIP this already!

The application we use to allow our technicians work trouble tickets through a web interface got completely hosed by SP2. They were fairly apathetic about the whole thing sending a link to a MS KB article that didn't solve the problem. There attitude was pretty much it was our fault for using SP2. I finally found a solution that involved basically hacking the registry to tun off one the SP2 security features which was breaking the products javascript.

If you've got a system plugged in to the public internet and you aren't using something similar to the subject line to update... well... you're probably not running FreeBSD. Silly you.

I'm a bit more forgiving for desktop use - I can type 'yast' on this machine and begin changing things. One day soon, when I take the time to make vmware run on FreeBSD 5.3 I will again experience holy homogenous happiness and life will be perfect.

I have heard of this SP2 of which they speak, but I have no fear, because I am far away from the blasted lands and their filthy start button virus infested machines...

Climb, brothers, climb! Go higher and higher, until no flabby, graphical interface only OS with an incontinent TCP/IP stack can follow. Dwell in the land of headless awareness and be at peace.

Recently I was in a remote location with a computer that came with the building. I reformatted and reinstalled windows. I needed to register it, get a new video driver from nvidia, and then go to windows update to get patches and then SP2. I was on a wireless dialup connection.Sometime into downloading the first patches from windows update, the machine started to act oddly. Down to a crawl. Somehow during that time a worm had taken over and installed 30 or so different malware programs.Screwed!There seems to be no way to get that computer secure on the internet without either buying 3rd party firewall or SP2 cd which was not an option at the remote location.

Please, please, please... Let's try to make ourselves a cut (however slight) above the rest of the wailing masses. I am so tired of the anti-MS cattle on/. Are they a big evil corporation? YES. Do they do mean, nasty things, often... YOU BET. Do they occasionally get something right.. (here's the tough one).. YES!
On to SP2. Although I don't work in the IT dept any longer, I know most of the people quite well and hear about when stuff is bad(tm). There are over 300 machines in the dept. that I work in. # of problems with SP2? ZERO. Is it perfect right after install - no way, lots of stuff doesn't work. HOWEVER, once the TCP Limit is fixed (yes, 3rd party fix, and MS should include it, but they, it exists), NX disabled (not ready yet) and assorted registry keys tweaked, it works fine.
Now, for the apostles of Linux - How many of you install the standard base sytem and change nothing? That's right, ZERO! You can't take stuff 'out of the box' and expect perfection. Same with SP2.
Is SP2 perfect, HELL NO. Is a PROPERLY setup install of it, tweaked by IT people with a clue better than SP1, YES.
Considerable improvements exists in SP2 (USB, wireless, etc). Granted, some things are garbage (windows firewall.. hahahaha!) but they are easily dealt with, removed, or ignored. It is foolish to ignore the good parts of SP2 just to complain about a cheesy built in firewall.
Broken apps. I have yet to hear of a broken app that doesn't have a patch, hasn't been replaced by a newer version, or can't be fixed with a couple of tweaks. We author and utilize a lot of in-house software, and the only thing an MS patch or upgrade, including SP2, has broken involved new security permission in.NET (and can be fixed either in the software, or by the blocked requests)
At least be thankful that MS fixes some of it's mistakes.

First, SP2 hasn't caused any problems in the broad range of machines I've seen or dealt with. While I don't doubt the 24% estimate, I sincerely doubt that 76% of machines lack the upgrade as a result of security concerns, which leads me to the second reason...

If approached by someone questioning why the machines aren't up-to-date, the lazy IT manager, feeling backed into a corner, will make an excuse about how he is still evaluating the potential dangers of the controversial upgrade.

It's not avoiding to fix them, it's just trying not to have to install the machine again.
And I heard of people having BIG problems with SP2 installations.
It's better to get a firewall, an antivirus, change email client and browser.
Less things to worry about:)

It's not just patches. If you want to install extra Linux software these days you had better have a broadband connection t'interweb. Without yum or apt-get resolving all the dependancies will take you a long time and some effort (broken dependancy xyz.lib, now where do I get that.)

Now windows installers are huge. But at least it's usually just a case of downloading and running setup.exe and all is done done for you.

It has far too few real applications. It will NOT attract proper developers, because the design prevents you from releasing a binary that will work for years. This is intentional, in keeping with the FSF's mantra.

Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".

We have Windows Admins at our site like you. They are so used to one particular way of doing things, I.e. installing off the CD, typing in product keys, setting up firewalls and anti virus, etc that they assume thats the way things work on Linux. They also suffer from an inexplicable blindspot, thinking fedora must be the easiest to use cos its got the biggest market share.

On my home mandrake system, I just type 'urpmi apache2' to install apache2. For fedora there is up2date (I assume its similar).

Most home users who do very little customization or fiddling could probably be up and running OS X within minutes. There's just a psychological factor involved when switching architectures. But then Macs are more expensive, right [linuxinsider.com]?

The same goes for basic corporate users, but since system skills can be acquired (by training, replacing, or hiring) there is also the option of linux or BSD.

Windows creates jobs, if it all "just worked" with no need for updates ever etc. then most Admin's would be part-timers, you would install the machine and never see the customer again, not exactly good for any buisness that according to the "free market" is supposed to expandviruses and malware on their own have created entire multi billion dollar industries engaged into defeating their effects, but conviently they just cant seem to eliminate the

The programs on the list are not the programs that are stopping admins updating to SP2.

The programs on the list are WORRYING the admins who are running custom software, legacy compatibility programs, specialised software.

I work for some schools in a London borough who have to make all financial arrangements over a program called SIMS which, last time I looked, was actually some sort of DOS-based program. It's had upgrades since but it still relies on communicating with the borough's financial systems which do not run on Windows but communicate over some sort of terminal interface. There were known incompatiblities with SP2 and this software because of the way it uses the network to communicate.

You upgrade and break that, the school can't pay their staff, buy products, organise mid-day catering or pay any suppliers. Because there is a policy of keeping all machines at the same patch level to prevent incompatibilities, the curriculum network (i.e. where the kids play) also cannot be upgraded until the incompatibilities are solved.

Therefore, 30-odd computers are forced to stay at SP1 because of the most important app in the school, which EVERY school in the borough runs (17 of them, I believe). That's getting into nearly a thousand computers all told that are hung up by an incompatibility with one program that's been running fine for YEARS.

You think MS know or care about a package that a London school uses on one machine in each school? No, so it's not on their incompatibility list. The point is that SP2 causes problems, especially with programs that use networking, that can only be found by testing. If the test fails, you have to wait for a fix from the vendor or make one yourself. In the meantime, you have to hold off on SP2.